Nooooooooo!

You know that bug-eye, rollercoaster-stomach thing that happens when you go to save your term paper, only the computer’s frozen and you look and look everywhere but you just know the brilliant text is gone? Well, we just found out that “This video has been removed by the user” is the blogger’s equivalent.

There was a video of Zeta Psi brothers at Dartmouth lightly hazing a pledge. We were going to share it, after getting a tip this weekend. Now, we have only the pathetic image above as proof we’re not making this up. Sigh.

The background: Zeta Psi was expelled as an official Dartmouth fraternity in May 2001 after an incident involving an edition of “The Zetemouth” newsletter that promised “patented date rape techniques” in a later issue. Not the most sophisticated move, especially in the shaky months following the Dartmouth murders. But no matter, Zete is back on track to be re-recognized in 2009. Unless, you know, a clip explicitly tagged “hazing” shows up on YouTube. We’re assuming a friend of the chapter prevailed on the people who uploaded it to take it down.

We’re actually not sure where we come down on hazing like this — that is, a pledge being forced to dig a hole for a very long time while older brothers drop what looks like flaming debris and firecrackers from a balcony. (“Oh, plus it’s raining,” adds one of the girls taping the scene from their house/dorm/whatever window across the way.) On the one hand: it’s kinda funny to watch — “DIG FASTER!” the frat guys yell, and the girls narrating say you can hear the entire campus laughing. And making the kid dig and climb three flights of stairs ad infinitum is just physical labor, nothing psychologically traumatic. (A friend of ours who went to UNC reports watching fraternal twins stripped to their underwear and saran-wrapped face-to-face, and then forced to drink water — hyponatremia alert!! — until one of them peed on the other.)

On the other hand: it’s a bunch of Dartmouth frat guys screaming at a slightly younger wannabe Dartmouth frat guy to dig a hole in their front yard. This is, in 5 minutes 4 seconds of banished YouTube, exactly why we never joined a frat.